WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THOSE LEFT-WING BLOGS WHICH PROMISED MUCH AND DELIVERED MORE OF THE SAME ALP GUFF!

I have looked in vain at the blogs I have been following for some time to try and find some positive suggestions about the directions politics are going in the Australian federal parliament - but it all comes down to the same refrain: "SUPPORT JULIA GILLARD OR YOU WILL GET TONY ABBOTT!"

In September 2013 we will be heading for the polling booths around the country to elect a federal government ostensibly for the next 3 years.

The current federal government is actually a coalition consisting of the Australian Labor Party, a few independents and - although they have stated that they are no longer remaining in the Gillard coalition government - the Greens who will vote with Gillard on most issues.

Gillard's right wing reactionary policies have been reinforced over time to outdo the excesses of the Abbott-led alternative coalition in order to win the so-called "popular" vote!!

Gillard has the opportunity of a lifetime to change the direction of the Labor Party and to bring it back to some semblance of what it set out to be over 100 years ago. Some of her worst ministers have left the front bench after the failed leadership coup of the last week and their departures leave the way open for some more humane policies on a range of issues.

It won't happen, of course! The asylum seekers will still be treated like criminals and locked away, out of sight, out of mind. Those people who have been put on newstart or whatever other demeaning names given to them by a government there for the rich to get richer while the poor are made to pay more for their greater poverty are just another step in the downward spiral of issues this government has mishandled.

Some of the blogs I have been following which seemed to hold hope of alternative media to the mainstream media which include the ABC have become mouthpieces for the ALP and not at all expressing views which might have provided some sort of progressive alternatives to mainstream political parties.

Reading the postings made on these blogs almost makes them seem like The Age or other newspapers which have become unreadable in the last few years because the proprietors demand from their journalists that they toe the MSM line or lose their jobs - some of which have been lost anyway because the MSM have become so reactionary that many people simply won't buy them any more and the newspapers have lost more and more money.

If I am still able to go on line - and more and more people are doing this - to get accurate and honest reporting of events around the world, why would I want to continue reading The Age or watching the ABC which has become more and more like an arm of a Murdoch rag?

Having lived in the apartheid South African police state during the period of some of the worst excesses there, a period of some 51 years, I have now been living in Australia and witnessing an Australian government committing some of the excesses of comparable horror to those of the South African regime.

In 35 years of living here and in spite of a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, since that Commission those deaths have increased dramatically in numbers and the treatment by federal governments and Northern Territory governments of its indigenous populations continue to be a national disgrace!

What does the future hold? Any sign of anyone offering some progressive policies for the foreseeable future? As the saying goes, DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH!